Category Archives: Evolution

Thinking about bird culture and cat’s lack of @ the S F Autoshow

December 10, 2014Around home, Cars, Evolution, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

In what I hope will be a tradition, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I went to the San Francisco Auto Show with Grandson Auggie and his father, Gabe. The San Francisco Auto Show is not a manufacturer’s show, Like the Los Angeles Auto Show or Auto Shanghai. It is really a local show put on by the Bay Area Dealers and that means that the cars that are there are cars that are available at your neighborhood dealer. It is not as exciting as a big show, but it does have its charms and going with the enthusiastic Auggie was great fun. I think he looked especially proto-macho in a Dodge pickup.

The only cars that were new to me were the Lexus RC F which I thought was stunning,

and BMW’s new hybrid supercar, the i8 at only $138,000 – I’m serious with the only, what else could you fantasize about for that little – it was the car of the show for me. It will go 22 miles on its electric motor and go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds when another electric motor and its three cylinder, turbo charged 1500 cc engine kick in (and I have already seen three of them on the road).

Walking around the show, I was interested in how similar so many of the cars were. I don’t mean similar in They all look alike, similar, but similar in that they are watching each other and stealing good ideas. Which is another way of saying Learning from each other. I was taken by the number of cars that had painted brake calipers. I think it was a fad started by Porsche but I am not sure of that. No matter who started it, now almost everybody with pretensions of having a fast car is painting the calipers on said fast car.

As an aside, it reminded me of a story the great Bob Lutz – whose motto was Often wrong, but seldom in doubt – told on himself. About six or seven years ago, give or take a couple, Lutz was the designated Car Guy at General Motors – they had brought him in because General Motors had almost completely sunk into a bean-counter culture, even referring to, and thinking of, Cars as Units. Lutz was on board to bring Car Love back into The General’s thinking and he was shown the mock-up of a new Buick that had portholes in the front quarter panel like the great Buicks of old. Lutz said, Get rid of the portholes, they are the past, nobody wants to buy an old Buick. A couple of nights later, he went to a party given by Maserati. All the new Maseratis had portholes. The next day Lutz called Buick design and said Put the portholes back in. End aside.

A couple of weeks ago, The Economist had an article about bird learning. They filed it under Animal Culture and that is probably more correct (if there can be degrees of Correct). The article is fascinating, short, and worthwhile. Two different groups of birds are taught two different – but equally effective – ways to open a box to get food (say Group A and Group B). When they are released into their subgroups of the general population, their feather-mates learn the same trick from them. However, if a member of Group A gets into Group B – for some reason, lost? – the Group A guy starts doing the box opening the Group B way. In other words, he conforms to the new group. Just like an immigrant learns the new county’s language.

Maybe once a week, either Michele or I will remark about how smart our cat, Precious Mae, is (it is embarrassing, but true). By way of example, a while back, Michele had gone to Napa to cook Thanksgiving dinner with her sister and I was home, alone, with the cat. That’s not quite accurate because I was inside and Precious Mae was outside, but the two of us are the only ones on the property. When I open the door, she runs in to get some food but, then, seeing that I am dressed to go out, she stops, thinks about it, and runs outside so that she will not be trapped inside.

However, I have always thought that the cats that have owned me were extra smart. But, when I watch a cat video on You Tube, and those cats often seem much smarter – except for the ones that are way dumber – and I wonder how much smarter Precious Mae would be if she were exposed to those cats in real life. What we do is isolate our cats and they don’t learn from other cats. What they learn, they learn from us or from themselves. Unlike car designers, cats don’t have a culture.

Looking at Ricky Gervais’s photo and thinking about racial diversity

May 30, 2014Americana, EvolutionSteve Stern

Mama and kittens ^{A photo posted by Ricky Gervais’s from a Gail Cousins Facebook share}

A couple of years ago, I read Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. It postulates the last fifty thousand years, or so, of human history through what we now know about DNA. (know is a fast-moving target here). I was knocked out. So much so that I tried to get everybody I knew to read it. Now Wade has published a new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History – technically, I guess, he wrote it and Penguin Press published it – in which he tiptoes through the minefield of race. I have not read Inheritance although I plan to even though it is catching alot of flack.

In America, there are only two views of race. One is that the races are equal – or there is no such thing as race – and the other one is that you are a bigot. Apparently Wade is not taking the we are all equal way and that is bothering alot of people. A couple of days ago, Gail Cousins posted this picture on her Facebook page and it reminded me how much variation and unequalness there is in most animals, including us. Reasonably enough, most other animals just don’t seem to care like we do. Still, we don’t like to talk about it in any real way. It is just too emotionally loaded .

That is too bad, because we are really learning alot about how we got to be who we are and that includes race. Most of the current known evidence indicates that, before we became Homo sapiens sapiens, we were almost wiped out as a species. According to Wade, in Before the Dawn, we were down to only about 1500 not quite-yet Homo sapiens. In fact, that close call probably is why we evolved into humans. It is much easier – more likely? – for a small group to make large evolutionary leaps and we did. As an aside, this is not a large evolutionary leap in any scale but our very limited We are special scale (and, as I reread this, on a what we are doing to the planet scale). End aside.

There are several different theories on why we were almost wiped out, ranging from a volcano near Yellowstone where there is still a super-caldera, to a massive volcano on the island of Sumatra, named Toba, but most anthropologists agree that most of the existing Homo species were wiped out by some sort of major natural catastrophe. What was left was a very small pre-human gene-pool under very stressful conditions, a perfect environment to force adaptation.

This small group, living somewhere around the horn of Africa, were our Adam and Eve. Of the 1500 humans, quoting Charles Mann, No more than a few hundred people initially migrated from Africa, if geneticists are correct. But they emerged into landscapes that by today’s standards were as rich as Eden. Cool mountains, tropical wetlands, lush forests—all were teeming with food. Fish in the sea, birds in the air, fruit on the trees: breakfast was everywhere. People moved in.

When a plant or animal moves into an ecosystem without natural predators, it flourishes. Think Scotch Broom in California, Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes, Rabbits in Australia, and Humans anywhere outside of Africa. According to the people who know much more about this than I do, our distant ancestors crossed into what we now call Yemen. They flourished and expanded, following the coast eastwardly until they got to India. Then we just went everywhere at once.

One of the small subgroups of those Indians migrated to Europe, another to China, and another wandered through Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia to Australia. Along the way, each traveling group was a subgroup of the larger group they left and each subgroup is a smaller DNA sample. The group with the widest DNA spectrum are the people who stayed in Africa and the narrowest is probably the last places to be colonized (most experts think that would be New Zealand and Polynesia). The range of DNA in all of Europe is much smaller than the range in Africa (I read somewhere that an average African village has a broader range of DNA than is found in all of Europe).

This means that the smartest or most athletic European is much closer to the dumbest or least athletic European than their equivalent is in Africa. In other words, as a reflection of the different DNA ranges, the ability – mental, physical, among others – ranges in Europe is narrower than the range of abilities in Africa. Another way to look at this is, if you were trying to get the smartest, most athletic, people for – say – a professional football team, you would be seeking individuals who are at the top end of the physical and mental end of the spectrum and the preponderance of them would be from Africa or of mainly African descent because the range of ability is greater in Africa. .

In the real world, about 60% of Professional Football players are of African descent even though the pool of white players is much bigger.

The horrific things we do to each other

November 2, 2013Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

I brought a biography of Clarence Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the Capital vs.Labor fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man, and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

Death Valley Easter Trip 2013: Red Wall Canyon

April 9, 2013California, Camping, Death Valley, Evolution, PhotographySteve Stern

I woke up early on our last full day in the Death Valley area and went for a short walk. It looked like everybody else was sleeping in and the day was dawning cool and still.

When I got back to camp, I realized that JR hadn’t slept in, just his bag had. He was up earlier than me and had gone for a longer walk. Finally, everybody got up, JR came back to camp, we all caffeinated in our favorite way, and we drove down valley to the closest we could get to Red Wall Canyon. Red Wall is a canyon in the Grapevine Mountains at the top of the third fan from the left in this very much vertical exaggerated screen shot from Google earth. We parked at the bend of the yellow Scotty’s Castle Road.

Our path was up the fan to the reddest looking hole in the mountains. Walking up a fan in the desert is totally different from any other kind of hiking I can think of. Around where we live on the San Francisco Peninsula, or in a forest, or in the Sierras, on those hikes, the cars – usually in an authorized parking lot – disappear when we walk away because, following the trail, we walk around something like trees or a ridge. Walking up the fan to Red Wall, the cars just got smaller. We walk completely in the open across terrain that is both unendingly similar in all directions and radically different every ten feet. There is no trail or, even right path. The Park Rangers encourage hikers to spread out so as not to leave traces and everybody ends up walking their idea of the best way up.

When we stop, we collect, then we spread out again.

As we enter the canyon proper, we start finding shade and places to stop for lunch (lunch for most of us, a place to climb for Courtney).

Deeper into the canyon, the fan gets steeper and narrower.

I am not positive that it is a immutable law of nature but every canyon seems to be graced by a dryfall or a series of dryfalls. Of course Red Wall is no exception. First there was a small dryfall,- almost a step – then, for all practable purposes a dead-end. (I have read that the canyon becomes easy again after the harder dryfall but we turned around there.)

After the turn around, JR took our official group portrait, on a ledge, in front of a distorted rock outcrop.

The ledge, by itself is worth looking at.

These lines are layers of sediment that were laid down in a sea – probably shallow because the rock is red indicating the presence of oxygen – off the west coast of North America. Then, about 15 million years ago, give or take a month, something raised it up¹ so that the ancient seafloor has now become the mountains were are walking through.

Once we turn around, it is all down hill.

1. The something probably being an ancient Plate – the almost completely subducted Farallon Plate – which was once between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate that are now rubbing together at the San Andres Fault zone.

By the time we get back on the open fan, the day has cooled and we are boogying along.

Very roughly, the fans are composed of flat areas with washed out gullies in between. Going down, it is much easier to see the flat areas which is often referred to as desert pavement and present easy walking. The combination of wind and time – lots of time – has sorted and flattened the rocks and they are often covered in a thin, dark, layer of manganese oxide called desert varnish.

Walking down the fan fast – and it is hard not to walk fast – is a walking meditation. Everything else falls away – atleast for me – but the next step and the direction of the step after that. The cool air, the ease of the walk, the canyon behind us, and the huge space ahead, all contribute to the meditation. It is both relaxing and exhilarating (that’s Gina and Michele in the center of the picture).

Then in the distance are the cars and all is right with the world (if you are into that sort of thing).

Part One: Here

Part Two: Here

Part Three: Here

Part Four: Here

Part Five: Here

Next: Going home here

Dinosaurs were birds department

October 11, 2011Current Affairs, EvolutionTalos sampsoniSteve Stern

One of the things that interests me about Science is how it is a reflection and enlargement of an individuals reaction to change. A healthy individual. When I was at college, one of the required courses was a two year general science course that included Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and Astronomy, among other things. At the end of the Geology stint, we talked a little bit about continents floating around which was a theory put forward by a sort of loony German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener. I remember our teachers pretty much ridiculing him and his theory as being pretty far out and unproved although he did have some interesting points. It sounded more plausible to me than to the teachers, then I forgot about it.

Years later, I got interested – maybe obsessed is a better description – in human evolution. I read everything I could find on human evolution and, in passing, started seeing lots of references to plate tectonics. All of the references seemed to take the floating continents for granted. In fact almost everything seemed to be based on the reality of the floating continents. The geological community had gone from denial – Wegener seems loony – to bargaining – maybe Wegener has some good points but there is more/less to it than that – to acceptance.

I have posted about this before, but it is interesting – much more than interesting, really, fun – to see the same thing happening with dinosaurs. They used to be slow and stupid; cold-blooded. Then, maybe, warm blooded – but that seemed sort of unbelievable. Then, OK, maybe warm blooded but still like reptiles. Then, maybe – but probably not – the predecessor to birds.

Now, they have found a new fossil Talos sampsoni – nice name, BTW, Talos for talon, I presume and sampsoni for Sampson; Sampson talon – and the talk is how the animal is a fast killing machine using its talons. All the bird-like characteristics are just taken for granted. He/she does give Angry Birds a new meaning.

Steve Stern's Fieldnotes from a Random Walk through Life (with pictures)

Category Archives: Evolution

Thinking about bird culture and cat’s lack of @ the S F Autoshow

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Looking at Ricky Gervais’s photo and thinking about racial diversity

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The horrific things we do to each other

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Death Valley Easter Trip 2013: Red Wall Canyon

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Dinosaurs were birds department

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